MOBS, TOFFS AND LAWS

I would like to think that you all know that the Sheffield district of Hallamshire was the heart of organised football, There were plenty of football type games being played on Shrove Tuesday, throughout the country, often degenerating into "Mob Football" from what was meant to be the "beautiful game". It wasn't a pretty sight. Places through the country such as Seascale, near Workington, in Cumberland, Kirkwall in the Orkneys and in Cambridge, where even Oliver Cromwell was known to "turn out", had their own games. And many still do.

The Yorkshire villages of Thurlestone, Denby, Penistone, Holmfirth and Hepworth all formed hot beds of football in the 1840s. An organiser of local football was John Marsh. A Marsh family ran the Horns' Tavern in Penistone (South Yorkshire) and there was a well known John Marsh who was one of the founders of the Wednesday FC (later Sheffield Wednesday of course) in 1867 and who ventured further afield captaining the Sheffield FA team that met the London FA in January 1871. This match had been played from 1861.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_v_Sheffield_(1866)

Indeed, the Lords of Hallamshire in the 17th Century issued by-laws to stop games of football which injured or killed too many fit young men, who might be useful in work or war. Six men from Norton dressed in green and six from Sheffield in red, hardly conjours up a "mob" but the game lasted for three days and casualties were taken. In Ashbourne in Derbyshire, 35 miles south of Sheffield, a riot took place in 1860 when 500 or more participants of the local Shrovetide Match clashed. The police were involved and many fines raised money for charity. Most of of the players were from the "middle classes".

It was young men from the middle classes and from all parts of the country who were educated at Cambridge University. They brought with them "rules" from their locality, which when brought together caused some confusion, when undergraduates met on Parker's Piece, a piece of parkland on the edge of the city and university.

It was here that the confusion was un-muddled in 1848 under the Cambridge Rules. No record of the original laws exist but in Shrewsbury School there was found a copy of rules from c.1856.

The drawing up of the Cambridge Rules was documented then and on October 8th 1897, H.C.Malden later wrote that 14 representatives from Rugby School, Eton, Shrewsbury, Winchester and Harrow and others met at 4pm in his room to formulate an acceptable set of "laws". The final list was copied and posted on Parker's Piece, shown below.

Malden claims that these laws were the basis of the Football Association Laws set in 1863.
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Cambridge_Rules_(1863)